Sept. 1 is the beginning of meteorological fall, but in Nashville you would not know it from the temperature. There are other signals that autumn is on the way, though. Asters and goldenrods are beginning to bloom, and acorns have begun to fall. The light is changing now, too — a certain slant at the end of the day that signals the approach of the autumnal equinox.
But the sign of fall I wait for most eagerly, the one that fills my heart with outrageous hope, is the great gathering of purple martins in downtown Nashville. These birds, North America’s largest swallow, have been coming here for years. Sometimes they use an old roost site; sometimes they choose a new spot.
In the United States, purple martins nest mainly east of the Rockies and spend winters in South America. They are avian acrobats, feasting on flying insects while in flight themselves. When it’s time to prepare for the fall migration, they gather in extravagant numbers at sites known as staging grounds. Nashville’s roost is one of the largest, hosting 100,000 birds or more each year.
Beginning in late June, volunteers from local conservation organizations like Bird Safe Nashville, Nashville Urban Bird, the Nature Conservancy in Tennessee and the Tennessee Environmental Council start looking for signs that the birds have chosen this year’s roost site. Last year it was the trees in a parking lot at the Tennessee Titans’ stadium. This year they’re roosting near the convention center. Neither is what you might think of as ideal bird habitat.
Chattering people crowd the sidewalks; country music pours from every open door and rooftop bar; neon pulses on sign after sign. And yet around 7:20 p.m., purple martins start circling high above the city, returning from their daytime foraging. As their numbers increase, they begin to circle lower and lower, a funnel cloud made of birds. By the time they start landing in the trees, they are flying low enough that you can feel the rush of their wings.
There’s no way to know for sure why the birds so often choose to join us in our most flagrant human absurdity, right in the heart in a tourist district, but if you think about it, it makes a kind of sense.
Purple martins are cavity nesters by nature, setting up their nurseries in woodpecker holes in dead trees. But in the eastern United States, purple martins have lost most of their natural nesting sites because of habitat destruction. They survive because people put up martin houses, multiunit nest boxes built to serve as avian apartment buildings.
In other words, virtually all the birds swooping in to sleep in Nashville’s sidewalk trees were hatched and grew up in proximity to human beings. Maybe they feel a sense of security around us, a feeling that they are protected from predators by our very presence. God knows there are plenty of people hanging out in downtown Nashville.
It’s possible to see the birds’ choice of roost sites as an irony: Human beings, who are responsible for the purple martins’ loss of habitat, are also responsible for their survival. I prefer to think of it instead as a parable. These birds are proof of what is yet possible when many people seek a way to compensate for the wide-scale environmental destruction that our species is responsible for.
Putting up a birdhouse will in no way lessen the devastation of extreme weather, which poses a huge risk to migrating birds, and it is not even a first step in repairing the devastation of habitat loss and fragmentation. But as we watch our elected officials roll back hard-won progress at a shocking and demoralizing rate, the martins tell us that we aren’t wholly inadequate to this monumental task. While we are waiting for sanity to return to our government, there are measures we can take, collectively and individually.
Let’s start with migratory birds:
Turn off outdoor lights. More than half the bird species in North America are migratory, and most migratory birds undertake their journeys at night. Artificial nighttime lights confuse birds, drawing them in and then making it nearly impossible for them to escape.
That’s why the Sept. 11 memorial lights are temporarily turned off when volunteers spot a large number of birds trapped in the beams. It’s why the lights illuminating the Gateway Arch in St. Louis are turned off altogether during the peak migration months of September and May. We can do the same at home. With lights that can’t be safely turned off, you can at least dim them, put them on timers or install hoods or shields that direct their light downward instead of into the sky.
Make windows visible to birds. To a bird, glass doesn’t register as a solid object. It’s a mirror reflecting the sky and surrounding vegetation. Or it’s nothing at all, an open portal to another place. Both illusions lead to dead birds by the hundreds of millions.
Bird-safe windows and doors are manufactured in a way that makes glass visible to birds, but unless you’re building a new structure or upgrading an older one, the next best thing is to coat the glass with a substance that birds can see. Officials at Lakeside Center at McCormick Place, a notorious bird killer in Chicago, treated the building’s glass with a grid of small, closely spaced dots that renders the glass visible to birds. This simple measure has reduced bird fatalities by 95 percent. You could mark the outside of a window with a grid painted in tempera or drawn with soap, or install screens, or hang ribbons from the tops of windows, or invest in one of the many affordable products meant to prevent window strikes.
Keep cats leashed or indoors. Domestic cats are an introduced species, not a form of wildlife. They hunt even when they aren’t hungry. Birds are responsible for the deaths of some 2.4 billion birds each year. Keeping them inside year-round or leashing them when they go outdoors could save many wild lives. That’s particularly true during migration season, when birds are already exhausted.
Make your yard safe for birds. Migratory birds must find food where they land. Bird feeders can help, but they need to be kept scrupulously clean to prevent transmission of illness. Better solutions: Plant native flowers and let them go to seed. Plant native trees and shrubs that produce nuts, berries and drupes. Swear off pesticides that kill insects and herbicides that poison food sources.
Maybe all this seems like a lot of trouble for measures that will hardly touch the troubles faced by migrating birds — indeed, by all wildlife. But every change you make can make a difference to the wildlife that surrounds you.
Don’t believe me? Come to Nashville and stand at the corner of Rep. John Lewis Way and Korean Veterans Boulevard at sundown. Turn your face up to the sky. Feel the rush of wings.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
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